LionShark Digital Marketing Blog

4 Things Missing from Your Content Strategy

9/29/2016

All businesses big and small need a content strategy that clearly defines what they’ll put out when. Whether this just includes blog posts and social media posts, or ranges the full gamut of sales copy, usage manuals, infographics, videos, and white papers, it must be planned in advance to be successful.

If your content strategy is missing any of these crucial elements, it won’t be as effective as it could be!

The 20 Most Common Email Marketing Mistakes

9/27/2016

Email marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to generate and nurture leads as well as strengthen an ongoing customer relationship, but only when it’s done correctly. For as many companies out there that are using email marketing well, it seems like there are just as many doing it poorly. If your business is committing any of these common email marketing mistakes, you may be missing out on the fruitful bounty that email marketing can cultivate:

How to Make Your Ecommerce Site Handicapped-Friendly to Boost Sales

9/22/2016

These days everyone is online, which means that your website has to be accessible to anyone regardless of physical capability. But people with vision issues, hand tremors, or any number of other handicaps often have a hard time using websites that don’t take these limitations into account when they’re designed. That’s why it’s so important to adapt your website’s usability. But before you get worried about the kind of modifications that you’ll need to make to accommodate handicapped users, you need to keep in mind that these adaptations are actually web best practices anyways. This means that these changes will actually benefit all users! So let’s dig right in and discuss how you can make your website more handicapped-friendly.

10 Tips to Make Your Small Business Website Look Like It Belongs to a Big Company

9/20/2016

Sometimes people don’t take small businesses seriously. They think that a small business won’t have the same kind of resources that a bigger company will have or the right personnel to do the best job possible, or the best prices. Whatever bias they come to the table with, they make snap judgements in the research phase and quickly rule out any business that seems too “ma and pop.” But as a small business owner, I understand all of the numerous advantages of working with a small business. It’s just a matter of getting clients to say yes to your business so that you can overcome that initial hurdle and prove yourself to them. This is why I’m always keen on trying to help other small guys get the business they deserve.

Here are my top 10 tips on looking like a big business to attract prospective customers:

Our 5 Favorite AdWords Hacks

9/15/2016

When it comes to PPC sometimes it’s the little tricks that can really help to cook up success. If you’re looking for some special tips to take your account to the next level, here are our favorite PPC hacks for AdWords (organized by the amount of work it takes to utilize each one):

Staying Positive When Your Hard Work Doesn’t Pay Off

9/13/2016

There’s nothing more frustrating than working really hard on something only to have that hard work go to waste or not pay off. When that happens it’s easy to take a trip to Negative Town (population: 1) and want to just throw in the towel. But the next time your hard work doesn’t yield the results that you’d like, here are some tips to stay positive:

Building Your Brand on Respect

9/8/2016

I’m not really sure what happened to respect, but it seems to have taken a serious hit in recent years. I remember a time when you could trust that the people and brands around you would respect you as a person. There were understood rules of engagement and standards to live up to, that constituted a sort of social contract. Breaking this contract had real consequences because people would cut ties with acquaintances or businesses that they felt were disrespectful in any way.

But as the internet has continued to grow into the behemoth that it is these days, we seem to have lost that face-to-face connection that respect is built on. Just look at the types of comments you see on online forums and articles or the way some businesses react to critical reviews – these definitely aren’t the types of civilized things that would be said to someone in person!

More and more it feels like people aren’t neighborly and friendly as they used to be and brands tend to be out to make the quick buck and move on. Essentially, we’ve created a society where people feel forced into independence because they can’t trust that the social fabric around them will respect them as people so they have to look out for themselves. It’s pretty unfortunate from an anthropological perspective, but it also provides a real opportunity for businesses to gain a competitive advantage by restoring the respect that seems to have been mostly lost. So as a business, how do you climb the mountain of consumer perception to restore respect? If you want to attract and retain customers, you have to respect them in the following ways:

Marketing to Children in a Way That’s Ethically Responsible

9/1/2016

These days there’s so much marketing aimed at children that it’s hard to even imagine a world in which brand messages aren’t geared towards our kids. And it’s easy to see why brands go after children – they’re impressionable and naive, which makes them easy to imprint marketing messages on, and they are often able to wield their parents’ extensive purchasing power. But just because we can market to children, should we?

As a mother, this is something that I worry about a lot, and this is the ethical dilemma that marketers of children’s products face every day, but I don’t think that it needs to be an either or. I believe that there’s a way to market to children ethically and that as marketers it’s our responsibility to do so.

These are a few key ways that you be sure to pitch your marketing message to children ethically:

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